Thursday, April 22, 2010

John Smithson - Plagiarist Tendencies Part 2?

Followers of the "The Midnight Review" may have noticed a little debate breaking up the typical political opinion and HOA posts usually posted on this site.

The main antagonist is one John Smithson of the "jds-midknightreview.blogspot.com" website, who has accused the creator of "The Midnight Review" (Kevin) of plagiarism. The main beef seems to be in the similar named websites which both offer political commentary. Obviously John Smithson has no case against Kevin; however, in the ongoing debate there have been hints that perhaps John Smithson himself is the plagiarist?

Kevin's April 14th article pointed to one instance where John Smithson lifted an article word-for-word from one written by Cat Corban of the American Thinker without giving any credit, claiming "formating problem I was having with this particular article".

Now today, as I casually go through my news sources (I even included Smithson's own website) I notice his April 21st article on Muslim Extremists threatening creators of South Park. The screen capture stuck out as it was one of the few pictures not blocked by the browser I was using, and when I checked the source of the image I saw it was hosted on Fox News.

After googling the first sentence following the image I came across the ORIGINAL article, dated April 20th, (2nd link in Google) not cited by Smithson's article. Smithson copied all but the 1st sentence, and the last 4 paragraphs, including the link to the actual South Park Episode, and did not ONCE reference, cite, or even link to the original article written by Joshua Rhett Miller for FOXNews.com (my condolences Joshua). Smithson did slap on an original(?) 1 paragraph Editor's Note at the beginning, where he sadly still forgot to cite his source.

Don't take my word for it, check out the links yourself or these screenshots I took today at 1:00 pm (Smithson will hopefully fix his mistake if he sees this):




The above screenshots are of FOXNews.com and jds-midknightreview.blogspot.com respectively.

How about the actual text of the articles (Plagiarized portions in bold italics)

From Joshua Rhett Miller's Article:

A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of "South Park" that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.

RevolutionMuslim.com posted a warning following the 200th episode of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park," which included a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad disguised in a bear suit.
A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of "South Park" that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.
RevolutionMuslim.com posted the warning following the 200th episode of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park," which included a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad disguised in a bear suit. The Web posting also included a graphic photo of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who was murdered in 2004 after making a documentary on violence against Muslim women.
"We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show," the posting reads. "This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them."
Reaching by phone early Tuesday, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post, said he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of van Gogh was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone did by mocking Muhammad.
"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."
Al Amrikee said the website is considering a protest against the "disgusting" show, which also depicted the Prophet Muhammad in an episode on July 4, 2001.
"This is not a small thing," he said. "We should do whatever we can to make sure it does not happen again."
The posting on RevolutionMuslim.com also includes audio of a sermon by Anwar al-Awlaki -- a radical U.S.-born preacher now believed to be hiding in Yemen -- who discusses assassinating individuals who defame the Prophet Muhammad. It also included a link to a 2009 story in the Huffington Post that gave details of Stone and Parker's mansion in Colorado.
A Comedy Central spokesman told FoxNews.com that the network has no comment on the posting
From John Smithson's Article:

Editor's notes: Muslims threatened the creators of the cable show, South Park, for an episode that comedy series did on July 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2001. This Muslim website ( RevolutionMuslim.com ) should be summarily shut down and its creators arrested on terrorist charges. But that won't happen. Heck, it has been 5 months since a Muslim jihadist shot and killed 13 solders at Fort Hood and nothing has been done about that - no charges, no prosecution ---- only a refusal to turn over timely documents to the Senate committee in charge of Home Land Security. But, back the point at hand; Midknight Review thinks the site's name is a red flag, in and of itself. We wonder when it will happen -- getting up one morning only to read about some poor dissenter with his head cut off by a home grown radical Muslim who used to live down the street. ----- jds.


Here is the story:

A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of "South Park" that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.
RevolutionMuslim.com posted the warning following the 200th episode of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park," which included a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad disguised in a bear suit. The Web posting also included a graphic photo of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who was murdered in 2004 after making a documentary on violence against Muslim women.
"We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show," the posting reads. "This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them."
Reaching by phone early Tuesday, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, the author of the post, said he wrote the entry to "raise awareness." He said the grisly photograph of van Gogh was meant to "explain the severity" of what Parker and Stone did by mocking Muhammad.
"It's not a threat, but it really is a likely outcome," al Amrikee said, referring to the possibility that Parker and Stone could be murdered for mocking Muhammad. "They're going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It's just the reality."
Some choice John Smithson quotes on the subject of plagiarism:

You plagiarize my blog name every day of the year. As a response,you find one article out of hundreds, an article that acknowledge the fact that it is not my story and then try to liable me with warrantless".


There is a difference between "pattern behavior" and what happened in the case of the American Thinker article.
One article now became two in the span of a couple weeks of posts, and this was only the first article that I decided to investigate further because it stuck out. What would happen if I decided to check every article?

Looking more like "pattern behavior" John? Lets give it some more time and see where this road takes us. Could be interesting.

Now John Smithson is not a journalist so maybe he's not aware of the responsibilities of a writer/reporter/columnist. Especially once you start treading on content that could effect ones income (I'm sure Joshua Miller might care if his pay is determined by web-traffic to his previous articles). The way Smithson wrote his article it almost seems as if he's trying to pass it off as his own. maybe he is, or maybe he's just not educated enough to know what he's doing.

What do I hope to gain from this post? Well hopefully it will do one or all of the following:

  • Inform John Smithson that performing these actions in his "reporting" damages his reputation as a writer which should be a concern for himself and his readers.
  • Inform John Smithson's readers that these actions have taken place so that they can demand better, more reputable quality from his writing.
  • Make John Smithson a better and more honest, reputable writer/reporter/columnist that his readers can trust.
Now, will any of these actions take place or will it just make John Smithson more clever about how he posts his articles? Only time will tell.

EDITORS UPDATE: John Smithson has revised his article to add the following citation at the end:

For the full story, see our friends at FoxNews.
I appreciate John making the effort and hope he continues to do so.

3 comments:

  1. Excellent observation. I had saw the South Park article too, but I was unaware that it belonged to somebody else...

    While I have seen Smithson give credit to some articles, I had also seen a handful of others that had not, so now your discovery raises the question: "How many articles are plagiarized?"

    I am sure a comparative text search will yield surprising results...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I updated the post to show that John has added a citation at the end of his article, so I'm glad that he has taken a step in the right direction and hopefully continues to do so. Thanks John (or JDS)!

    Ideally I do hope this puts his talks of sending C&D letters and accusations of plagiarism against you (Kevin) to a rest.

    And really if this forces him to spend 2 minutes while pasting another article onto his site to add citations (1 1/2 minutes longer than currently), than his site should be even better for his readers sake.

    You're welcome!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't think he has truly learned how to properly cite an article. While I'm not suggesting he conform to MLA or APA formats, his copy-and-paste jobs are highly confusing. Just consider his latest post from April 23rd titled "Understand that the fight over health care IS NOT OVER. Repeal and replace is the only sensible campaign platform."

    He copies Fox New's article "Administration Defends Health Law Despite Medicare Report Hiking Nation's Tab," from the same day.

    The entire article is copied, including the last line: "Fox Business Network Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report."

    Smithson makes it sound as if he was the originator of the article, and that Rich Edson and the AP only contributed...

    ReplyDelete

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